Creating Your Own Game - C# Game Programming: For Serious Game Creation - page 386

game interaction, try to re-create it. Re-creating parts of existing games is an
excellent way to improve your skills.
When you get your great game idea, then it's time to move on to the next stage:
the feasibility test. Do you have the resources to create this game? If it requires
hours of full-motion video, hundreds of hours of gameplay, and thousands of
fully animated monsters, then unless you are surrounded by some extremely
talented friends or are very well-funded, you may have to tone down your am-
bition. The ideal game will be something that pushes your abilities but is still
achievable. If you are very new to game development, start with small projects
that can be achieved in a few days (such as Pong or Space Invaders ) and slowly
work your way up to more demanding projects.
Once you've decided on a game idea that's passed your feasibility test, it's time to
break it down into manageable chunks. This is the fun, high-level design bit. You
have a vague idea of this great game, but now you need to solidify the idea and
work out how it's going to fit together. A good idea is to sketch out the classes
and systems of the game on paper with boxes and then indicate relationships and
interactions with arrows. This rough high-level plan is a great thing to pin to a
wall or keep in your development area. It's a map that will help guide you as you
starting digging into the details of the project. If you still don't feel you're quite at
the boxes and arrows stage, then try playing your vision of the game in your head
using your imagination. What happens when you first start the game? When you
begin the first level? What actions can you perform? How does the world respond
to those actions?
Let's say you want to create a game in which you must sing different songs to
make characters on the screen perform actions and interact with the environ-
ment. When breaking down this design, the first big system that jumps out is the
player input; being able to detect if the player is singing and then determine
which song the player is singing is an area that will require research. The singing
section needs a small project all to itself. At the very least, one system will have to
get the voice input from the player via the microphone, and another system will
have to be able to identify the different songs the player is singing. Each creature
will have to be checked to see if the current song being sung is important to
them. The actions the creatures can perform need to be defined. The win/lose
state of the game needs to be defined. How the world is represented needs to be
defined. These are some of the questions this one line game design brings up. By